Comment 106 for bug 121653

Yep, the restricted manager should warn users about problems with fglrx, in addition to release notes. Actually, I translated the restricted manager so that it gives a small warning about losing desktop effects when using fglrx, since most people think "3D drivers" would give them those by default. Anyway, restricted manager does warn people that using restricted drivers may be problematic because they cannot be fully supported.

Regarding desktop effects, I'm aware that Xgl works with fglrx for desktop effects, but I'm usually talking about ordinary user's perspective, sorry for not pointing that out. No ordinary user will ever install alternative X server, so for most users fglrx does not work with desktop effects. For those people knowledgeable enough to install and configure alternative X server, they can also probably hack away with workarounds that probably will appear for fglrx, or install their own fglrx drivers when the newest ones are released.

Regarding development resources, any time spend with workarounds for fglrx by the core devs would, in my opinion, be away from having top-notch gutsy otherwise, and problems with fglrx generally are frustrating to fix as no source code is available. Simply put, closed drivers should be fixed by the developing company, AMD in this case. Of course, anyone in the community is free to spend time improving fglrx support and offering solution, code and ready-made .deb packages and work on getting that in, but apparently no-one was interested enough or skilled enough to do just that for gutsy. It's too late to complain at this point of time.

And finally regarding X1600, like I stated open source drivers do not yet fully support it in gutsy which is unfortunate, but it's not a regression from Feisty either. There _is_ an experimental xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd for people to experiment with, though. AMD has only very recently decided to improve the situation, so it will take time until AMD/ATI cards are as well supported as eg. Intel graphics. Even NVIDIA provides a fully working open source 2D driver, even though it's obfuscated and their 3D is closed.

Anyway, this is in many ways going off-topic, but Mark's main point of not having proper warnings is a very good one, even though including the fglrx problem(s) in the Release Notes is a good thing.